Gut Cult January 21, 2009

Editor: Aaron McColloughInfo: The following passage from Hannah Arendt goes a long way towards describing what GutCult
assumes is at stake in poetry. Although we don’t presume to say we are accomplishing miracles,
we aspire to them.

“We find in these parts of the New Testament an extraordinary understanding of freedom,
and particularly of the power inherent in human freedom; but the human capacity which
corresponds to this power, which, in the words of the Gospel, is capable of removing
mountains, is not will but faith. The work of faith, actually its product, is what the
gospels called ‘miracles,’ a word with many meanings in the New Testament and difficult
to understand. We can neglect the difficulties here and refer only to those passages where
miracles are clearly not supernatural events but only what all miracles, those performed
by men no less than those performed by a divine agent , always must be, namely,
interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose
context they constitute the wholly unexpected.” — Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom”